Have desk, won't travel

It's a lonely planet for Kristen Noehr, researcher for Seven's The Great Outdoors. Photo: Jacky Ghossein

The life of a travel show researcher can be a frustrating one, Guy Allenby discovers.

It might not be up there with the worst occupational hazards, but regular attacks of itchy feet can really niggle at a person. Especially, says Kristen Noehr, if you have a limited window of opportunity to scratch them.

"We get four weeks off a year at Christmas," explains the researcher for Channel Seven's The Great Outdoors. "That's when the ratings period is over and that's when you get your time off. For a lot of places, it's not the ideal time to go."

Talking to Noehr, it's clear that a hunger for travel comes with the territory. But that's hardly surprising, considering the 31-year-old spends her working days plugged into the internet or attached to a telephone researching and organising domestic and overseas trips for others.

Noehr is part of the six-person research team working behind the scenes on the "90 to 100" destinations the travel show visits each year. "I might look at the calendar and see that I'm down to do a Victoria trip with Laura [Csortan]," Noehr says, "so basically I'd start looking for stories that would suit Laura."

Typically, three stories have to be shot in one six-day domestic trip. "If we find one good tour operator or one accommodation or one good story idea in a region, we'll try and find two more in that same region," she says. International trips can run to up to three weeks.

A researcher on The Great Outdoors is not, she hastens to add, a glorified travel agent. "You need the specialty knowledge of television because it is very different from travelling as a tourist. Travelling with a crew, you have to worry about the 150 kilos of excess luggage they travel with. You have to worry about the extra time."

You can't shoot a day tour "in real time", she explains. "You need at least three times the amount of time that you would do it as a normal tourist, if not longer."

And the budgets aren't as big as you might imagine. Locally, the show has "really good relationships" with the individual state tourism boards, which provides a van or 4WD big enough to haul equipment and a four-person crew (producer, presenter, camera operator and sound person). Similarly, permit fees for filming are often waived because the relevant authorities "understand we are promoting tourism".

Accommodation, meanwhile, is organised as a "contra" deal. "We'll ring a B&B or a hotel or whatever it is we want to come and shoot," she says, "and we will ask them if they are prepared to put up the crew in exchange for the national publicity."

Which goes a long way to explaining why TV travel shows seldom lay in the critical boot.

Overseas, however, the scoring of freebies and permit waivers is more difficult because Ernie Dingo and his cohorts are not so well known.

"We really have to work a lot harder to try to get anything for free there," Noehr says. "There's a lot more negotiation."

The planning for an overseas trip typically begins "up to three months ahead"; for a domestic trip "a couple of weeks ahead". Indeed, sending a film crew overseas means slicing through some serious red tape. Not only are there visas to worry about but all camera and sound equipment has to be declared. "You have to declare what it is worth and where the equipment originated. It's quite specific."

It's not Noehr's job to complete all the paperwork for each trip. That unenviable task falls to one of her colleagues. It's up to Noehr to work out "where they [the crew] will stay, who they have to meet, when they meet, what talent is going to be on camera, exactly what elements of the story we need to shoot".

Essentially, her job is to work out where the presenter and crew need to be almost every minute of the day. "You can't be quite that specific, but you try to not leave anything to chance, because the producer has enough to worry about on the road."

Noehr supplies the producer with an itinerary before they leave as well as "research briefs" for every story. These briefs fill in the background on a destination, including its history, information on the tour operators, anything special about a region, plus "any information they could use in writing the scripts".

By the time the crew is hot-footing it to the airport, Noehr has already finished her own vicarious journey to the destination.

"If friends ask me, 'Where's a good honeymoon location?' or whatever, I can rattle off all these different places and things to see and where to eat," she says. "And they say, 'Oh, wow, when did you go?' And I never did, but I feel like I went there."

Not that there haven't been times when the desire to experience an out-of-the-way place for herself - and give those itchy feet a good scratch - has becomes simply too overpowering. Iceland being the most notable example. "I actually went there only a few months after I'd researched it. I was just so inspired."